GLR March-April 2026

ESSAY

The Prehistory of Gay YA E RIC L. T RIBUNELLA

S TANDARD HISTORIES of young adult literature date its emergence to the United States in the late 1960s, when publishers and librarians began pro moting more realistic novels targeting teenagers with spending money as a specific consumer de mographic. However, its genealogy stretches back at least a century earlier to the publication of boys’ boarding school fiction, such as Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857, and domestic novels about girlhood development, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in 1868/69. Although purportedly for middle- and high-school readers between the ages of twelve and eighteen, YA literature has become a pub lishing juggernaut by also appealing to pre-teens and adults, and some of the most profitable authors of the past 25 years have made their careers in YA, including Suzanne Collins, Rick Ri ordan, Stephenie Meyer, and John Green. Given its emphasis on contemporary social issues and its role in helping youth nav igate adolescence, YA books about gay teenagers finding love, encountering homophobia, and coming out have become an im portant subgenre. Scholars of gay young adult literature understandably focus with gay content” and “the first to deal with homosexuality.” However, Donovan’s book was neither the first adolescent novel to make same-sex love explicit nor the first work of fiction for youth to depict a sexual encounter between boys. Sixty years before Donovan’s book, Edward Irenæus Prime Stevenson published a comprehensive 1909 study of homosex uality titled The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life . Best known now as the author of the first explicitly gay American novel, Imre: A Memorandum , in 1906, he wrote as a humanist and covered topics such as history and art, in contrast to most other book-length works of sexology from the turn of the century, which were written by physicians and psychiatrists for an audience of medical professionals. Born in New Jersey in 1858 but later settling abroad, Prime Stevenson astonishingly acknowledges the existence and value of homosexual youth, whom he calls “young Uranians,” and in cludes a section on homosexual juvenile fiction in which he Eric L. Tribunella is the author, most recently, of Uranian Children’s Literature and the Early Gay Movement in England: The Romance of Youth (Routledge, 2026). on the Stonewall era and later, pointing to John Donovan’s 1969 novel I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip , published the same month as the Stonewell Riot, as the first to allude to a physical same-sex encounter be tween two teenage boys, Davy and Altshuler. One authoritative source (Cart and Jenkins, 2006) dubbed it “the first young adult novel

names his own two boys’ novels as examples. The term “Uran ian” derives both from 19th-century German homosexual rights pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who proposed it as the name for same-sex-loving men, and from Greek mythology, in which Aphrodite Urania represented heavenly or spiritual love as op posed to sensual or earthly passion. “Fiction for young people that has uranian hints naturally is thought the last sort for cir culating among British boys and girls,” Prime-Stevenson writes. Not much has changed in this respect since 1909. James Gifford, a trailblazing scholar of gay literature, was one of the first to call attention to Prime-Stevenson’s “subver sion” of the boy book form by the injection of overt same-sex love between adolescents. His first boy book, White Cockades: An Incident of the “Forty-Five” from 1887, follows the late 19th-century vogue for boys’ historical fiction and depicts a six teen-year-old Scottish lad named Andrew, who helps Charles Edward Stuart evade English soldiers after the Jacobite defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Anticipating later gay lingo, Prime-Stevenson repeatedly describes Andrew as hiding Bonnie Prince Charlie in a secret chamber of the family manor referred to as “a sort of closet.” When the villain, a sadistic English of depicts much fearful grasping and clutching in the closet and declarations of love between the youth and the prince. When Stuart finally makes his escape, Andrew leaves Scotland with him. Prime-Stevenson concludes the novel by noting that Stu art “and his gallant looking protégé seemed inseparable even in private,” as Andrew remains forever by his side. These charac ters lack the language Davy uses in I’ll Get There to discuss his relationship with Altschuler, but Prime-Stevenson nonetheless makes clear both the emotional connection and physical affec tion between Andrew and the young prince. Prime-Stevenson describes his second boys’ novel, Left to Themselves: Being the Ordeal of Philip and Gerald (1891), as even “more distinguishable” for its “sentiment of uranian ado lescence.” Seventeen-year-old Philip, an orphan in the care of a resort proprietor, rescues a young boy staying at the hotel from assault by a tramp, and the two fall instantly in love. When Ger ald’s widowed father writes to summon his son to meet him in Nova Scotia, Philip chaperones the youth as they make the jour ney from upstate New York while evading a mysterious antag onist who pursues the boys and seeks to kidnap the handsome Gerald. The youths must deal with a shipwreck, Gerald’s seri ficer, finally insists on searching the hiding place, he demands to be shown “this won derful hole.” In The Intersexes , Prime Stevenson refers to Andrew’s “passionate devotion” for the Great Pretender and de scribes the youth’s feelings as “homosexual in essence.” Filled with suspense, White Cockades

Starting in 1887, Prime Stevenson subverted the boy book form by injecting overt same sex love between adolescents.

March–April 2026

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